Growing up in God’s garden

I have been a small-membership church pastor for about 12 years now. My first appointment was waaaaay out in the country, which was a small cultural shock for a city-slicker Yankee like me. However, I tried to get into the spirit of things. I learned to quilt, to crochet, to sew and eventually to can tomatoes and make salsa. I even made ketchup once just to say I did it.

There was a screened off square place to the back and side of that first parsonage that was grown over with weeds. It was obvious that one or more of my predecessors had grown a garden there. So, seeing as I’d never grown a garden before, I thought I’d give it a try. I had no knowledge of gardening, nor did I bone up by going to the library to read a book on it. I just did it.

First I took a pitchfork and dug in the dirt and chunked it and hand-tilled it. I got all the weeds out and turned the dirt over, and turned the leaves and pine needles into the soil. Even we city slickers are taught about the importance of compost to the soil. Then, in this approximately 144 square foot garden, I planted a miniature farm.

There were tomatoes and bell peppers, of course, lettuce (sure, why not?), carrots, a single row of corn (after I thinned it out there were seven stalks), and cantaloupe. I didn’t have any bean poles, so as much as I love field peas and butter beans, I decided not to try those. I wouldn’t know how to train them, anyway.

The farmers in that area found my little Yankee city-slicker farm amusing. They told me that carrots don’t do well in Georgia clay, and that the corn wouldn’t “make” (meaning make decent produce) and neither would the cantaloupe. Corn, it turns out, must be planted in several rows so that it cross-pollinates. The cantaloupe, too, I was told did not have the right kind of plants nearby to pollinate correctly.

They were right about the little carrots that the clay produced and that I let my daughter feed to the horses whose grazing field met the edge of our backyard. They were right about the ugly-looking corn, too.

The tomatoes were great, as was the lettuce and bell peppers. I learned to can them and developed a taste for the green ones fried in flour and cornmeal. I made salsa and we enjoyed fresh veggies for our dinner salads all summer and tomatoes into the fall.

One day about midway into summer, I was tending to the garden. I was hoeing and chopping with the spade, uprooting weeds and giving aeration to the soil. Somewhere along the line the thought occurred to me that since the farmers knew what they were doing and since, out of maybe five that I planted, I only had one vine of cantaloupe growing in the garden — and that didn’t appear to have any fruit on it — that I’d chop it and turn it into the ground. So I chopped away. Chop, chop, chop.

And then I saw it.

There, under a cluster of leaves, was a baby cantaloupe, insisting on becoming what it was even though all conventional agricultural wisdom said that it shouldn’t even be there. If the farmers’ knowledge can be taken as authoritative, this little cantaloupe was evidently immaculately-conceived.

I was surprised; I certainly didn’t expect to see anything but a fruitless vine. I’d planted it while ignorant of any rules of cross-pollination, so I had no reason to doubt the farmers’ advice. I was sad, too. I cut off this fruit from its stem.

I bent down closer to see if by some miracle in all my chopping, I hadn’t cut that part of the vine yet, that maybe God could spare my little miracle cantaloupe, quietly growing. I, trusting more knowledgeable counsel than my own, had aborted its mission to feed our family of three and give its seeds for new fruit and to give its rind back to the earth when its life was over.

The farmers were right about the corn and the carrots.

They were right about cantaloupe, too. But they were wrong about THIS cantaloupe. THIS cantaloupe was going to insist on being what it was created to be.

I cut it off from the vine, giving it no more hope to bear further fruit. How often we go about our lives, trusting in human knowledge and wisdom, relying on Dr. Phil or Oprah, or even the latest popular Christian curriculum, oblivious to the fact that God wants us to trust his wisdom over our own.

God knew us before we were born. He knows when we rise up and lie down and has every hair on our head numbered. He wants us to grow, to be that fruit on the vine that insists on being who he created us to be, despite all earthly counsel that would tell us we can’t be, or shouldn’t be.

If we would tend to our vines instead of chopping them up, thinking they’re fruitless, maybe we could find the premature fruit of our faith growing hidden under God’s protective leaves and, staying connected to the vine, bring it to fruitful maturity.